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From: torben@dorsai.ics.hawaii.edu (Torben N. Nielsen)
Newsgroups: comp.mail.misc
Subject: Re: Info on IDA Sendmail kit / pathalias
Message-ID: <104@dorsai.ics.hawaii.edu>
Date: Tue, 29-Sep-87 04:45:09 EDT
Article-I.D.: dorsai.104
Posted: Tue Sep 29 04:45:09 1987
Date-Received: Wed, 30-Sep-87 06:44:08 EDT
References: <20962@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU> <1692@umix.cc.umich.edu>
Reply-To: torben@dorsai.ics.hawaii.edu (Torben N. Nielsen)
Organization: Dept. of ICS, U. of Hawaii
Lines: 34

In article <1692@umix.cc.umich.edu> honey@citi.umich.edu (Peter Honeyman) writes:
>yeah, that's a small problem with sendmail: as delivered, it doesn't
>allow you to run arbitrary programs/scripts on addresses.  frankly,
>many people find it a lot easier to munge headers in c or sh than in
>sendmail's rule language, possibly the most brain-damaged language ever
>invented, yes, rob, even worse than postscript.

Agreed. The language is primitive and when you first start looking at it,
it looks impossible. But you can do a lot with it. The ability to run
arbitrary programs/scripts on addresses would be nice to have. But it might not
be necessary if we could agree to a real separation of concerns between UA
and MTA.

>i suppose it's possible to make the local mailer a router that looks at
>the address and passes the message back to sendmail ... maybe not.

I don't see any reason why it wouldn't be possible. I just don't think it's
desirable. I've always been taught that one should separate concerns as well
as possible; i.e., write well-defined modules that cooperate across clear
interfaces. There's enough ``intelligence" in local mailers now.

>
>i've seen sendmail hacks (from waterloo?) that let rewrite rules munge
>addresses with $>program.
>
>	peter

Read:

	Mail Processing at UIUC, Report No. UIUCDCS-R-86-1289

According to that document, this was first done by Gary Murakami at AT&T.

							---torben